UMi Z Review: A Powerful Phone with Clean Design

My first impression with of the box is “amazing!”. It shipped with all-metal box, black in color, with UMi logo in front and a sticker on the back with all details like CPU, System and everything in the box and what you see is gold. In the box is everything that you see on the photos, the Gold Z unit with a white sticker on top to remove the outside plastic covers, charger-labelled Fast Charger with EU plug, a manual inside a black envelope and a red USB Type-C cable.

UMi Z Review – taken and photoshopped by ikr99

UMi Z Review: Design

The best way to describe the UMi Z is “an iPhone clone”. Design-wise it really looks like iPhone 6 and to say it does feel like an iPhone 6. The Z’s front design is, what I love to describe it as, a nice and clean. The front design is the home button with a fingerprint scanner at the bottom with two soft buttons that do not light up, remember that! Someone, not me, thinks that there the only fingerprint scanner and again, someone totally not me, got confused between the two buttons always, hahaha! At the top, there’s a selfie camera, an earpiece, a flash for the selfie and a notification LED. That’s it, see? It’s nice and clean.

Honestly, the front design of the Z is more complex that the back design. And speaking of the back, there are two lines like just iPhone 6, the camera with a laser and a four LED flash on the line and the UMI logo that’s all. Others like volume buttons and power button located on the right, the 3-choose-2 hybrid SIM tray placed on the left side, the 3.5mm audio jack located at the top and the USB Type-C located at the bottom sandwiched between two speakers.

Performance

First up, the fingerprint scanner. At first, I think it’s work fine until someone said that you have to compare. So when comparing to iPhone 7, the fingerprint scanner on Z is, what I’d like to say as, “not fast”. In its stock state, that means no out-of-the-box state, you have around 75% out of the 32GB storage, that 25% used for the system files. On average, the UMi Z uses 1GB of memory all the time.

Antutu gives 21,000 for 3D, 44,576 for UX, 27,486 for CPU, 7,145 for RAM and overall of 100,2074. But I seriously didn’t even know why I’m benchmarking it because personally, the Z operates smoothly. The game launching, Instragraming, Inboxing and Whatsapping, all those normally simultaneously run by me, is pretty much smooth. And that’s all I think that matters, after awhile you will think it’s work smooth.

Camera

For the UMi Z rear camera, I think the 13MP did nicely. The laser really improves the photos taken by this phone. It can differentiate two objects, for the dual focus features, and the four LED flash does make your photos better. One thing that I’d like to mention, the photos is a bit dark, but you can tune it by swiping right on the camera app. Speaking the camera app, the are a bunch of modes you can choose like Facebeauty, Pro Photo, and Panorama.

One thing that I’d like to warn you, you should turn off the shutter sound, it’s good at first but later it just annoying sound. The are also another setting for the camera app like HDR, Gesture Shot, Smile Shot and 40 shots for the burst short. The best thing is, there is an option for video capture, which is 4K. But let me warn you, be careful when you shot videos in 4K, you will never see your 32GB storage used up. The selfie camera, I think it overexposed, but you can totally fix that.

Software

When it came out of the box and connected to WiFi, there’s a notification came up for the update system. At first, I thought it’s going to be Nougat, well it not, it just to fix a couple of bugs. I’d like to remind you that, UMi has confirmed that the Z will get Nougat, it’s just a matter of time. The User Interface (UI) of the phone is a just stock version of Marshmallow, I mean not really much customization done by UMi. Apart from the soft-buttons that do not light up, you can choose virtual buttons, there’s short cut from the drop down menu.